PSA - Undocumented side-effect of Caspian's ablative armour.
Whilst doing the experimentals engineering runaround for my shiny new Caspian Explorer, I decided to follow a hunch that paid off big time.
As you all are no doubt aware, when landed on a planet, if your next system destination is far enough above the horizon (just how far, I'd never bothered to work out), there's no need to get to orbit first (and no need to align with the escape vector) before making an FSD jump directly to the destination system.
It turns out that when you have ablative armour installed in your Caspian, that 75° approach angle works in the other direction too. So long as your next destination system sits more than 15° above the horizon, you can jump directly to it, instead of having to get into orbit first!
(As a side-benefit, I now realise that in any other ship, that height above the horizon needs to be at least 45°.)
Posted Dec 3, 2025, 1:32 AM UTC